Assessment

Holistic assessment and ongoing evaluation needs to be integrated into your designs for learning. Tracking how learners are performing, providing evidence of their engagement and transformations is a necessary part of the learning process. Assessment, however, is a challenging task and has many different purposes, so it needs to be carefully considered and planned. Following are some principles and suggestions for practice:

It’s not (just) the test at the end—make sure assessment is ‘for learning’ (formative assessment) and not just ‘of learning’ (summative assessment).

Evaluate performance over a whole Learning Element, or a special assessment task (such as a concluding joint or individual project) which tests the full range of knowledge processes required in the Learning Element.

Assess capacities to source and deploy knowledge—not just what they can memorise for a text, but what a learner can source in relationships of collective intelligence (e.g. group work) and from available knowledge resources.

Use qualitative judgements to justify quantitative ratings.

Have learners build individual portfolios (e.g. digital portfolios) where the proof of the result is in the portfolio as much as the commentary and rating; assess the knowledge work a student does, and not just what you can infer they have learnt in an end-of-program test.

Assessment Schema

Following is a schema for the ongoing evaluation of knowledge processes that can be integrated into planned learning experiences. Consider how you might integrate this into your practice.

The schema allows you to track each of the knowledge processes:

Experiencing

Conceptualising

Analysing

Applying

It also enables you track how well a learner is moving from

The competence to think and act with assistance

The competence to think and act independently

The competence to perform collaboratively

In this schema, the capacity to make and share knowledge with others is considered the most difficult and higher order level of competence because it involves communication, negotiation and sensitivity as well as sound knowledge of a subject or capacity to undertake a task.